Chapter One #2
This brought them to Earl’s own research.
For years, he had scoured archives across Vermont, looking for Polk’s correspondence, in the hope of finding reference to the Colloquies.
In 2007, as they all knew, Earl had come across a letter from Polk to Charles Eliot, then president of Harvard, referring to “a puzzling document left literally at my doorstep, purporting to recount a subterranean continent.” This, along with Earl’s discovery of other letters from Polk to his sister-in-law Evelyn, with whom Polk had carried out a decade-long affair, argued forcefully against the Colloquies as Polk’s invention.
Indeed, for the past two years, Earl had traveled monthly to Saratoga Springs, where he’d found Evelyn’s eighty-seven-year-old granddaughter, Doris, who had long puzzled over the great stashes of letters in an inscrutable hand, addressed to “Bunny” and “Tasty Lamb” and signed with such endearments as “Your Fox,” or “Your Hungry Wolf.” Though Doris had refused their publication, it hadn’t taken much persuading to get her to let Earl study them, on the agreement that he would give her legible transcriptions, an arrangement he had followed only partially, given the risqué, often graphic endearments of the good museum director.
It was one of these trips that Earl had just returned from, and he was pleased to report—and here he looked around the room with manifest satisfaction—that he had found not one, not two, not three, but four more mentions of the Colloquies, across the months of March to June 1897.
In other words: shortly after they had been deposited at the museum.
There was, in the hall of the Mountain Catch, an audible gasp.
Earl took up a piece of paper. The first three mentions were rather brief, referring to the “puzzling manuscript left at my doorstep,” but the fourth deserved mention in full.
It was from June. After going on at some length about the heat, the stillness of the night, his thoughts of Evelyn, his memories of Evelyn, her eyes, her lips, her neck, her breasts, her sweet…
“Ladies present, Earl,” said Hugh.
“Aw, come on,” said Kayleigh Swan.
…and so on, until there came the astonishing passage Earl then read: “I am nearing the end of my transcription of X’s manuscript.
Still, I do not know what to make of it.
I have begun to wonder if there is not some truth in it.
If this is but one of the portals referred to since old times, and if the entrance to Paradise lay not in the stars above, but at our feet. ”
Earl looked up to a room now stunned to silence.
Then Hugh began to clap, and Clem joined in, and soon all were clapping, and Earl stood back and beamed.
Even Miles felt himself caught up in the enthusiasm, as if somehow this discovery proved the existence of an underworld, rather than, for example, that some credulous, philandering turn-of-the-century museum director Miles had never heard of until that moment had fallen for a hoax by a guy called X who claimed to have met a 104-year-old man beneath the earth.
But Miles recognized the archivist’s rush, and the equal rush of camaraderie as Andrei met his eye and winked.
Earl took his seat.
—
The next presentation was “Underground Water in Catamount Hollow—What Does Dowsing Tell Us?” and the presenter was none other than the aforementioned Andrei Abramov, Ph.D.
, who took his place at the podium while Hugh lowered the light, and an area map appeared on the screen.
He began by thanking Hugh and Earl, and his friend Miles for joining them.
In fact, he said, it had been with Miles that he first had the idea to dowse in Catamount Hollow.
He did not remember if Miles could recall, but one day Miles had arrived while Andrei was dowsing in his orchard, leading him to put his dowsing rods away hastily, out of fear that Miles would tell Paloma, who, the last time she’d seen him dowsing, had printed out twelve scientific articles about how it didn’t work.
Miles indeed remembered his friend’s furtive shuffling, but had thought perhaps that Andrei was enjoying himself in his orchard, something that, in a typically Milesian, nonjudgmental way, he chalked up to local custom and natural rights.
In any case, fortunately, Andrei hadn’t intended Miles to respond; the point was that he’d been perfecting his technique for almost two years when it occurred to him that it might aid the group’s efforts in mapping the subsoil of the Highly Likely Quadrangle.
Since he’d begun, he’d made some dozen trips and produced the map they saw before them, which Hugh had helpfully overlaid with Frank’s magnetic studies and the mapping of vegetation disturbance by the late Wendell Saknussemm, may the good man rest in peace.
What followed was actually pretty boring, which disappointed Miles, who was rooting for his friend.
Perhaps it was because he was a humanist, so that the love letters of an obscure museum director were far more compelling than wells and watersheds.
But everyone else seemed interested, very interested.
People pointed to this or that spot on the map and mentioned this rock or that tree, and some took notes, and it only ended when Hugh took up the gavel and reminded them that they had to end by ten o’clock.
“Candace?” said Hugh, and Farm Candy rose from her seat.
—
Thus they moved on to the last presentation of the night.
The fact was that the Internet sensation, utterly comfortable patching a roof in little but her overalls for three hundred thousand followers, was very nervous before the gathering, a fact she acknowledged as she began.
“You’re good, girl!” yelled Kayleigh Swan.
“Thank you!” said Candace. The group meant the world to her.
They all knew about the divorce, and sometimes social media just got so lonely.
She felt trapped by fame, the world’s expectations.
Nods all around, as if they all were also YouTube stars.
Well, it had taken some time, said Candy, but, thanks to Hugh, to Kayleigh, she felt encouraged to share a bit of her own work.
She wasn’t a historian like Earl, or a scientist like Andrei; she was a romantic, and for her, the Colloquies was, at heart, a love story.
As everyone knew, she and Margie and Gerald had been getting together separately to closely read chapters 13 to 17, which some dismissed as a little kooky, a little, what’s the word—
“Juvenile,” said Hugh. “But real.”
Right, well, maybe she was just a little juvenile herself, but fact was that all that talk about magnetic anomalies and angles of repose left her a little cold…
“No judgment!” shouted Kayleigh.
…but since the first time she read the Colloquies in full, she’d been drawn to the character of Princess Gabalor.
“Nothing wrong with Princess Gabalor,” said Hugh.
Princess Gabalor, said Candace, gathering courage, who was so beautiful, but also so lonely, perhaps lonely because of her beauty, because of people who wanted to know her for the wrong reasons…
and she’d been moved to do some drawings, and the drawings became paintings, and, well, there really wasn’t more to say.
“Margie, can you turn on the lights?”
—
The meeting adjourned, as promised, exactly at ten.
Everyone helped clean up the refreshments, and arrange the chairs, and at ten-fifteen, Miles found himself filing out through the kitchen, between Bentley and Andrei.
For the first time since he had arrived in Greensbury, he felt he actually had a superabundance of friends: the question was not could he get a ride, but whom to ask without hurting the others’ feelings.
But Andrei had come with Candace, Gerald, and Earl, and Bentley had come alone, and so, happily, Miles boarded Snowflake’s scooter, and rode into the back of the Encyclopedia of Foolish Errors, Registry of Unsubstantiated Nonsense, and Inventory of Wrong Ideas.
It had been nearly a month since he had taken that first, fateful drive, and little had changed—the same foot shiatsu awaited him, the same candy wrappers littered the dashboard, and the same Slurpee sat in the cup holder.
No sooner had they pulled out of the lot than Bentley asked what Miles had thought of the meeting.
Miles was much more interested in hearing the opinion of Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley, Scourge of Folly, so he answered briefly, and truthfully, that he’d been surprised, and pleasantly so, having gone expecting, well, he wasn’t sure what he was expecting, save to be rescued from his doldrums, which now seemed so remote as to belong to a different individual entirely.
That was not to say he didn’t have questions.
“Shoot,” said Bentley.
Well, said Miles, trying to figure out a way of phrasing this nonjudgmentally, and offering a few words of qualification, it was still not clear to him how much of the evening to take seriously.
“I would take the entire evening seriously,” said Bentley.
Perhaps, said Miles, he meant he wasn’t sure how much of the Colloquies he should take seriously.
“That,” said Bentley, “is a different matter. But go on.”
“Well,” said Miles. “Hugh, for example…”
“Hugh thinks his herpes protects him against Covid,” said Bentley.
“Got it,” said Miles.
“Hugh thinks that the little pooch he found wandering in the woods is Jeremiah’s two-hundred-year-old dog, Whiskey, even though it had a name tag with another person’s name on it.”
“I was wondering,” said Miles.
“Hugh thinks I’m Denzel Washington,” said Snowflake.
“Nothing crazy about that.”
Snowflake flashed his handsomest grin. That, he said, was the correct answer. “But the point is, I’m not sure you should base any conclusions on what Hugh thinks.”
“Then what about you?” asked Miles.